4.3. History of X   

In 1984 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed Project Athena. The goal was to take the existing assortment of incompatible workstations from different vendors and develop a network of graphical workstations that could be used as teaching aids. The solution was a network that could run local applications while being able to call on remote resources. They thus created the first operating environment that was truly hardware and vendor independent - the X Window System.

By 1986 outside organisations were asking for X. In 1988, MIT officially released version 11 release 2. The X Consortium now handles all the development of X and the most recent version is release 6, which was released in September 1995.

The next big release is likely to be called Broadway

X has now reached the level of success that most unix vendors incorporate it as standard into their own windowing systems, and it is widely available for other platforms such as the Macintosh and the PC.

At the moment X, and X Window System applications, are at the beginning of a strong growth stage. The X consortium has a lot of online information about X. The next few years will probably see a demand for people with some knowledge of the X Window System (though to put things in perspective there will probably still be a much greater demand for people to sit at little boxes writing boring Cobol programs).